Music Review : Master Chorale Ends Season With ‘Carmina’

For its final concert of the season, Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Sinfonia Orchestra ventured a two-part meditation on the ephemeral nature of human happiness: Brahms’ “Nanie” and Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

Preceding these challenges, however, conductor Paul Salamunovich offered the audience a curiously familiar novelty: Elinor Remick Warren’s “Our Beloved Land,” a choral anthem that the late composer had expanded from her 16-measure chime-theme (originally commissioned for Hollywood Bowl) that Pavilion audiences hear before all concerts and during intermissions to call them to their seats.

Like the Brahms lament (set to a poem by Schiller), it was sung sumptuously, without bombast. But odd hesitations in both pieces, and the utter subjugation of the orchestra in the latter, flawed performances that otherwise achieved ideal choral balances and rich tone.

High-speed passages in the Orff displayed the Chorale’s spectacular clarity of attack, but deliberate-unto-stodgy tempo choices elsewhere and a general lack of forward momentum kept Salamunovich’s interpretation strangely passive in this most dynamic of choral showpieces.

Occasionally, an odd sense of fragmentation intruded--as if everyone were singing random syllables--but the great male chorus at the end of the Tavern section boasted genuine expressive power among its distinctions.

The crucial baritone duties fell to Zheng Zhou, effortful in the early Tavern stanzas, forceful and secure in the Abbot’s hymn to drink, but dry to utter tonelessness in the amorous “O, o, o, totus floreo” interjections of the “Court of Love” section.

Kerry O’Brien sang with consistent purity of tone, though the high notes in her final, rhapsodic “Ducissime, totam tibi subdo me!” clearly were hard won. Bruce Johnson made a plaintive, tremulous Roasted Swan, even managing to suggest that the burnt fowl savored the irony of his predicament.

The Los Angeles Children’s Chorus added to the lushness of the performance but the orchestra, once again, sounded pallid much of the time. A handsome program insert supplied texts and translations for the Brahms and Orff compositions.